LinuxQuestions.org Announces 2009 Members Choice Awards

LinuxQuestions.org, one of the most active and popular forums for Linux users on the Net, just released the results of its annual Member's Choice Awards. Readers chose their favorites from text editor to distro, and everything in-between. According to LQ founder Jeremy Garcia, the poll drew more than 13,200 votes from the LQ community.

It should surprise no one that Ubuntu topped out the desktop distro poll, with 30% of the audience going for the big U. But that's a drop from 2008 when Ubuntu scored 35% of the vote. The surprise in this category is the insanely strong showing for Slackware Linux, with nearly 17% of the vote. Debian topped the server distro poll, with Slackware taking second place there as well. Obviously, Slackware has a strong showing on LQ.

In a slight upset, GNOME edged out KDE ever so slightly with nearly 42% of the vote. KDE has historically dominated that category, but it was edged out by 13 votes. The top dog for window managers this year appears to be Compiz, followed closely by Kwin.

Vim users will be happy to know that it came in at the head of the pack with 35% of the vote, more than enough to crush Emacs' paltry showing of just over 7%. The venerable vi also turned up with a little over 7% of the vote. Second place went to no-frills gedit, at nearly 16% of the vote.

LQ overwhelmingly picked Firefox as the top browser, with more than 65% of the vote, which holds true with the browser stats for readers accessing the site. Though IE didn't make the list for voting, the visitor stats for LQ show that Explorer holds second place for traffic with 18% of the traffic for 2009. Voters put Chrome in second place, with 13%, though Chrome only represented about 4% of annual traffic. That could be due to the fact that Chrome was hard to come by on Linux for most of 2009.

What makes the poll more interesting than most is not just the raw numbers, but the comments that go along with the voting. Each entry had its own thread in the forums and users were more than happy to hold forth on their opinions in greater detail. Some are more thoughtful than others, but well worth a skim for anyone participating in one of the projects voted on.

The awards cover more than 20 categories in all, so check out the full results to get the full scoop.